As we sailed across the Strait of Magellan, we left Tierra del Fuego behind. But we still had a lot of Patagonia ahead of us. After a quiet Christmas in the City of Red Roofs, we cycled back onto the Patagonian pampas - encountering some of the hemisphere’s biggest birds, and fields bursting with the pinks, yellows and purples of flowers in bloom. Then three days on stormy seas among the fjords of southern Chile brought us to a tiny town in a steep-sided cove, with no regular streets or sidewalks. Instead there were five miles of boardwalks, and the main part of town lay at the top of 20 flights of wooden stairs.

As we cycled further north in Tierra del Fuego, we were enveloped by the treeless expanse of the pampas. Fields of grass that stretched to the horizon fed herds of sheep and smaller bands of guanacos. But the serenity of the vistas stood in sharp contrast to the weather, which buffeted us with strong winds that made bike handling a challenge and slowed our progress to a crawl. After a couple of tough days, we made it to the border and crossed into Chile. There, our hopes for a rest day were dashed by a terrible weather forecast - forcing an overnight cycling marathon to outrun the storm. Our reward, at the end, was a rendezvous with royalty at the King Penguin Nature Reserve.